K.M. Shea's Blog, page 20

My Angelique Writing Process

Hello, Champions!

I’m still working my way through Angelique’s fourth book (Trial of Magic) and I can safely say that it is going to be quite bit longer then Reign of Magic as it is already past Reign of Magic’s word count and I’m STILL. NOT. FINISHED. YET.

It sometimes feels like I have to put a excessive amounts of energy into projects like this that have so many complex and interwoven plot lines going on. I want to make sure I get everything right, which sometimes means throw-away lines from the Timeless Fairy Tales series get their own dedicated scene in The Fairy Tale Enchantress series. (This happened with a line from Twelve Dancing Princesses.) I was trying to come up with a way to show a bit of my writing process to you, and then I remembered I already did something like this back when I wrote Snow White!

Watch this YouTube video to see the interesting… strange(?) conversations I have with myself!

Considering I made this video in 2018, it’s kind of comical how little things have changed. When you are listening to the video, just subsite “Trial of Magic” every time I say Snow White, and then when the pile of books shows up, mentally add a few more books to the pile to represent Snow White + the three Angelique books. 2018 Research “me” didn’t know how good she had it – I have even more books to deal with now!

Watch until the end of the video to see my bloopers reel!

I hope this made you laugh, Champions! Thanks for watching, and now I’d better get back to the slog…

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Let’s Celebrate a Milestone!

Hello, Champions! Writing has been a bit of a slog, lately, so I decided to take some time out to celebrate a major career milestone for me! Back in April, The Queen’s Crown became my first book on amazon to have 1,000 reviews!

Because of an amazon policy I have to post a link to the book so you guys can check it out and see that I haven’t manipulated the image, so here’s that link: The Queen’s Crown

This screen grab is from the day we crossed this milestone–Queen’s Crown has already blazed on past and keeps getting more reviews. Magic Forged (Hall of Blood and Mercy #1) will catch up pretty soon, too, as it’s in the 900s for reviews as I write this.

This is a really big milestone for me as an author, and I can’t thank you all enough for joining me in this new world and supporting me along the way. I didn’t know if I’d ever get a book with over 1,000 reviews. My closest hope was Beauty and the Beast, because it’s been out for nearly nine years and has had time to slowly pull them in. I thought if I gave it another year or two it might make it. But no, you amazing, wonderful Champions made a book that was only three months old at the time pass the 1,000 review mark. Wow!

I’m so humbled and thankful for your support and love. Honestly, Trial of Magic has been a real bugger to write, but seeing the way you all rally around me and our community makes me determined to make Trial of Magic well written and–hopefully–worth all of your patience and loyalty.

Thanks for reading, Champions. I hope you have a day filled with as much celebrating as me!

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Happy Mother’s Day!

Sunday May, 9th is Mother’s Day in the United States (and several other countries).

I am not a mother–unless Perfect Dog qualifies as a child–but I have a wonderful mom who, in addition to being a patient woman (raising a child as imaginative and sensitive as me was no small feat) continues to advise and teach me to this day. My mom is one of my beta readers. She catches editing errors, and she has a special knack for noticing when I accidentally let a character drop from a scene. She also poses as a sounding board, and lets me talk out my ideas with her. Her friends would be shocked to learn the high percentage of our conversations that revolve around make-believe people and places.

I know quite a few of my Champions are mothers, but no matter your status–grandparent, parent, step-parent, sibling, child, friend–when you boil it down, today is about celebrating love!

With that in mind, here’s two of my short stories that celebrate this love:

Parent’s Night: PDF file (Court of Midnight and Deception series)A Mother’s Responsibility: PDF file (Snow White series)

 

If you enjoyed these you can find all my short stories in the Freebies/Extra section. There are stories from every series and even a few stand alone shorts so there are a lot to choose from, enjoy!

P.S. Now that I think about it, I spent most of April cooking rice and chicken for Perfect Dog and occasionally sleeping on the couch as she wasn’t feeling well. (She’s better now, but it was a long four weeks.) So I’ve decided Perfect Dog does qualify as a child! And what kind of mother would I be if I didn’t share a photo of my cute “child” when given the chance? So here for your viewing pleasure – a photo of Perfect Dog from this last winter! What about you Champion, do you like to share photos of your children/pets?

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MBRC Boxset Sale!

Great news, Champions! For a limited time the Magical Beings Rehabilitation Center complete series boxset is on sale for .99 cents! This boxset usually sells for $5.99, so this is a big sale! (This sale will last a little less than two weeks!)

Click here for the US Amazon link | All other Amazon stores

 

This is a young adult paranormal/urban fantasy series, but while Morgan is a teenager the high school drama is pretty nonexistent–this series is more about finding the humor in what every day supernatural creatures would be like if they really existed in our world. (Vampires drink tomato juice, werewolves have fleas, cyclops run multimillion dollar businesses, that sort of thing!)

This series is most famous among the Champions for its humor–especially if you can handle jokes about Twilight. The second book is the rare case of being better than the first–I say that with a lot of confidence because I was a better writer when I tackled it–but I’ve been told the humor is so fantastic and the Chicago setting is so spot on it doesn’t matter.

So if you need a laugh, snag this series! If you already have it, please pass the news on to a friend who you think would enjoy Morgan’s adventures at the MBRC, and thanks for reading!

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What’s Happening

I figured it was about time to give you Champions a community update on what’s happening in both my schedule, and what I have planned for the summer!

Currently, I’m still writing Trial of Magic. I’m sorry to say (for my own sake, I suspect most of you will be happy) that Trial of Magic is probably going to be just as long as Reign of Magic.

For reference, Reign of Magic was about 160,000 words. All of the Court of Midnight and Deception books were in the 93,000 to 98,000 range. Most of my fairy tales are approximately 75,000. So, Trial will basically be more than two fairy tales in length.

I’m still on target for a mid/late summer release, but it will reeeaaalllyyy depend on this month and if I can get it entirely written! I already know editing is going to take a while, mostly because of all the fact checking I will have to do for….reasons. (Hahah, only partially kidding! Part of it is that I have to make sure I cover everything I need to in the middle section of this book.)

Later this month I’m going to have a big sale on the MBRC complete series boxset! I’ll make announcements and post it everywhere when the time comes so you don’t have to worry about missing it.

This summer we are NOT doing the polls. For any new Champions, I typically have 3 polls that I hold every year (Favorite KM Shea/AM Hero, Favorite Heroine, and a special poll where you can all vote for the specific kinds of heroes you’d like to see in future books!). Last year we did a whole slew of them for favorite animal sidekicks, favorite couple, and favorite secondary couple. But we don’t have time for that this summer.

Instead, we decided to go all in on the Fairy Tale Enchantress/Timeless Fairy Tale series! As I mentioned in a previous post, the TFT series will be getting paperback covers that match their ebook covers, we’re going to do a massive sale on TFT as well, and we’re going to have a little reading challenge to prep you for Trial of Magic!

But that’s not all… I also have a secret project I’m working on–it’s not a new book, sadly–that I’m hoping will provide some extra fun! And in the background I’m also going to be getting some Second Age of Retha stuff going–as I announced in the newsletter I plan to have emblems made up for the various guilds in the game, and I’m working on a glossary as well.

WHEW, I think that’s everything that we–the KM Shea Team, that is–have going on for the next few months. It’s going to be busy! A big thanks to the KM Shea team–Meg, Myrrhlynn, Vin, and our Discord mods SuperRog and Mythical Cat–for all their help! (Editors and cover artists too, obviously, but these guys are working their tails off right now as we’re trying frantically to prep for everything!)

Thanks for reading, Champions, and I hope you have a fantastic week!

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Paperback News!

I’ve got some (hopefully) exciting news!

The Court of Midnight and Deception trilogy is now available in paperback–wohoo! As usual a big thanks to Meg for doing all the paperback formatting, and thank you to Covers by Christian for making the covers!

My second piece of paperback news is that the paperback versions of the Timeless Fairy Tale series are finally going to get covers that match the ebooks!

The paperbacks will be the same size, same page count, they’ll just have these new covers!

This is something a bunch of you have been requesting for a long time, and after enough gentle nudges from Meg I decided to give in and get matching covers. These new covers will be going up sometime in summer. (We’re going to throw a massive party to celebrate when Trial of Magic launches, which will include a big sale on the Timeless fairy tales ebooks. The covers will be up and ready to go by then!)

SO, if you want to complete your collection of the current covers, now is the time to buy! Or if you want to get the new covers, hold off on purchasing just a few more months!

That is all for this week. (I say that is all, but OHMYGOSH, Champions, changing covers for eleven books is such a pain!! A huge thanks to my cover artists (DDD) for struggling through this with me, and for Meg and all the formatting changes she’s been making!) Until next time, have a fabulous week, Champions, and enjoy the paperbacks!

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The next urban fantasy trilogy!

Today I’m officially revealing the main character and setting of the next Magiford Supernatural City series! The important thing to know is that we’re going to visit werewolves!

Yes, that’s right! As many of you guessed, the next trilogy will feature the Northern Lakes werewolf pack–that’s the werewolf pack Chase Washington from Court of Midnight and Deception is a part of!

The series will follow the shenanigans of Phillipa “Pip” and the pack alpha, Greyson. Greyson is obviously a werewolf, but Pip is human! Or, more correctly, she’s a sort of sub-version of a wizard as she is, in fact, a werewolf hunter!

Yep, a werewolf hunter living with a pack of wolves–that should be fun to read about!

Werewolf hunters lack the elemental magic regular wizards have, but Pip get’s some pretty fun trade offs and some specialty strands of magics that wizards don’t have. Which is good for her–she needs every advantage she can get when it comes to surviving with the werewolves!

You can count on seeing Chase in this trilogy, and a few other familiar faces from Court of Midnight and Deception! And while Pip and the werewolves live in northern Wisconsin, they will frequently come to Magiford. They live in a cute little tourist town–which, surprise, has a mini golf course–and as of now I’m planning to have Pip work in the town’s welcome center…which should provide buckets of fun given the wide variety of supernaturals that come to visit!

This trilogy will hopefully launch in early 2022, if this year goes according to plan. I don’t have a working series title or any book titles, but I’ll be sure to update you Champions later in the year once everything is settled.

And this draws an end to the Magiford themed posts. Right now I’m hard at work on Angelique, but I’ve got some sales and other stuff up my sleeve to help you wait it out. Thanks for reading, Champion! Have a lovely week, and I hope you enjoyed our visit to Magiford!

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Magiford Supernatural City!

As we start to wind down all the Court of Midnight and Deception I thought this was a great time to discuss the future for my urban fantasy world! First of all, I have an exciting announcement–the world is going to have it’s own name, which will make future series in this universe a lot easier to identify. I’m calling it the “Magiford Supernatural City” world/universe.

I already have quite a few plans for this world, but I thought I’d go over what you can expect. As of now (2021) the plan is to release one series per year. Currently I plan to write only trilogies in this world, and most likely they’ll all follow the same launch pattern of approximately two months to get all three books.

There will be an arc that tangentially follows the Paragon and his mysterious quest–which we now know from what he’s told Leila that he’s searching for someone. The Paragon’s search will have four series total, with two of them being Hall of Blood and Mercy and Court of Midnight and Deception. (This means you’ll get two more trilogies to tie up the Paragon’s search.) I’m guessing some of you will assume that means the Paragon will be the hero of one of the two remaining trilogies, but he’s not. The Paragon has a very…strong personality, and it’s very unique which is honestly a bit difficult to market. At this time I have no plans for him to have a trilogy of his own, but I might give him a standalone novella or novel depending how everything finishes. (I still have other series to work on, after all.)

The next Magiford Supernatural City trilogy–which I’ll release in 2022–will not involve the Paragon’s quest. It’s going to be a spin off of sorts–I’ll get into the specifics of it in the next post!

I do already have plans for a few additional spin off series–besides the trilogy that will launch in 2022. All of them will tackle different kinds of supernaturals and issues, but you’ll always get to see a few old characters in each trilogy. You’ll find that I’ve planted seeds to these spin offs in the four trilogies that make up the Paragon’s quest!

Even better, we’ve seen and heard of the heroine that will fill out the third trilogy of the Paragon’s search! We saw her in a Hall of Blood and Mercy short, and she was discussed in one of the Court of Midnight and Deception books and a short as well. Can you find her? (I am planning for this heroine’s series to launch in 2023.)

That’s all for today, Champions! In the next post–which is the last Magiford themed post–we’ll talk about the next Magiford Supernatural City trilogy!

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The Journey

Typically, I plot out my books meticulously because I hate rewrites, and my general goal is to avoid them as much as possible. But as I mentioned in my 2020 recap post, this year I listened to Brandon Sanderson’s class via youtube, and I decided to really drill down and focus on shaping my characters by the principals he presents. Unfortunately, that meant I had a couple off scenes and one long false start that I ended up having to redo. I asked the Champions in our Facebook Group if they’d be interested in seeing these deleted scenes and edited snippets, and the overwhelming answer was yes! So let’s take a walk down memory lane and see how I re-shaped parts of CoMaD through out the writing process!

1) The Original beginning:
As part of the refining process I ended up having to redo the first 20 pages of Crown of Shadows. The events all stayed the same–even most of the dialog is there, though there is an additional fae character I cut for the sake of keeping things shorter. But in the original ending, Leila’s hatred for the fae came on a little too strong to the point where she was bitter and was pretty much impossible to work with once I got her to the mansion. I ended up having to go back and significantly soften her disdain for fae, which made her about 50% less paranoid (which is saying something) and also made her a lot more likable. (As a character, she wasn’t meshing well with Skye, Indigo, or even the Paragon because of her dislike of fae. That made her extremely unlikable since the Paragon is a pretty popular character.)

If you want to see this original, more hate-filled version of Leila, click here for the PDF!

2) An incredibly lazy fight scene:
The fight scene you see in Magiford Mid Summer Derby where Leila and the night mares are attacked is actually the second version of the fight. I had an original fight scene that was much shorter….honestly because I was feeling lazy at the time and really needed to just FINISH the book. When I did my first read-through of the book I ended up doing a rehaul of the scene because it was just so…bad. It was too short, the use of magic didn’t make sense, and it felt amateurish. Worse yet, it was supposed to be the climax moment in the book! Yeah, a lot of work had to be done to save it.

Click here for the PDF if you’d like to witness this original fight.

3) Leila asks Rigel to be King:
In Queen’s Crown, Leila asks Rigel to be King of the Night Court. In the version that got published it’s a close moment between the pair, that shows a bit of Leila’s desperation. In the original version of the scene I hadn’t correctly underlined that Leila lacked a connection with her Court–and when I wrote this scene I already knew that and I knew I’d have to go back and fix it. During my first tread-through I did a better job of underlining the lack of connection–which I actually set up in Crown of Moonlight–but then I knew the somewhat slap-dash/not-at-all-serious way Leila asks Rigel to be King in the first version of this scene wasn’t going to work. Rigel becoming King was a way bigger deal than I originally made it, and it was an important turning point in their relationship.

So I entirely ripped it out and completely re-wrote it from scratch. Click here for the PDF if you’d like to read that part of the original scene!

***

There were a few more scenes that got some rehauls. In the wedding, I originally had a golem attack Rigel and Leila before I discussed the book with Britta–my beta reader–and she pointed out if I brought the spiders back in it would better draw in the initial attack, something I badly needed since I had to show the original offender hadn’t given up. I also did some rework with Leila in the mansion, and reworked a scene with her fae nobles, but the majority of those changes were minor or slight enough that you probably wouldn’t notice them very much.

But there you have it, Champions: a glimpse of how rough my books can be in the first drafts. Typically what I write in my first draft is very, very close to what you end up getting, it’s just finessed and I typically have to pull out a little more of the romance and underline more of the subplots.

I hope you enjoyed that behind-the-scenes peek! Thanks for reading, Champions, and have a wonderful day!

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Rigel & Leila

This is our last batch of deep dives into characters, and we’re hitting up our main protagonists: Rigel and Leila!

When I first designed this series, I knew Rigel was going to be a challenge. I mean, the guy tries to kill Leila the first times he sees her. Ingratiating him to other characters, much less you Champions, was going to be a difficult task.

Moreover, I needed Rigel to be believably competent to the point where he was almost scary, but then I needed him to believably switch to helping Leila. The tension of the story would be terrible if he easily switched sides, and if he started the series by siding with her that was going to make the whole thing of him trying to kill her totally fake. And Rigel needed to be the one to try to kill Leila because it would make for interesting romance–which is a real fight for me–and he was my best source of clues for hinting at who was ultimately responsible, which I badly needed!

To make it worse, Rigel wasn’t a talkative character! Killian is charismatic and totally willing to carry on a conversation, which makes it easier to show out the different facets of his personality. Rigel–silent with a penchant for looming–was the exact opposite. This meant I had to show more scenes from his point of view so readers knew what he was thinking and, more importantly, I had to make every sentence he spoke and every physical action he took count on about five different levels.

It’s a huge deal when–during their wedding–Rigel steps up to protect Leila. But it took pretty much the entire book to set up for that moment so you’d be able to understand how crucial that change was.

I wanted Rigel to fall in love in a way that was different from my previous male protagonists–particularly Killian and his love story with Hazel. That was partially what inspired me to make him an assassin–the idea of taking this silent assassin and mashing him with loveable Leila and watching the sparks fly made me actually excited–instead of petrified–to write their romance.

Hilariously, the hardships with Rigel became the very thing that made him fun to write: his subtleties.  The way he can tell the glooms and shades apart and will pet them, the fact that he listens and hears Leila when she’s up late at night and fighting an emotional battle–he shows his character and his love in a hundred tiny ways. And while that was daunting at the start of the series, by the end I was having an utter blast dreaming up all of his minute actions.

Plus, I love a good villains-to-lovers romance, so I was destined to like our taciturn hero!

Fierce, blunt, and hilarious Leila is undoubtedly one of my favorite heroines I’ve ever gotten to write. Her sarcasm combined with the general obliviousness of the fae–and their horror at her playfulness–made her a dream to write.

She tumbled onto the scene because I wanted to write a modern day heroine who didn’t want to be queen and was so different from her people she was practically alien to them. I knew it would make for some great laughs, and I also knew that in order for the fae to be “saved” just as Hazel and Killian have begun whipping the vampires and wizards into shape, that the fae needed someone who wouldn’t back down but was also kind enough to listen.

And that is Leila’s true power. Yes, she won’t take death threats sitting down, or let her nobles push her around, but she’s willing to forgive, and she can be kind. That’s why she accepts Chrysanthe’s friendship–and Chrys pays her back tenfold. It’s why she loves the night mares even though they look like something that stepped out of a horror story–and again, they pay back her love tenfold.

While Leila’s sarcasm is the flashiest part of her personality, it’s her kindness that makes reclaiming the Night Realm possible. The Night Court would never have shown up for a queen who only belittled fae and did whatever she wanted. But they would die for Leila because she’s strong enough to stop the infighting, and soft enough to forgive them.

For example, even though she hates socials and does everything she can to decrease spending, she knows those events are important to the fae, so she makes sure they happen. (On a much more reasonable budget, but it’s the thought that counts!) And while she resists tea for almost the entirety of the series, her loyalty to her people is what makes her break and try tea–and she’s rewarded because it turns out her people decided to try coffee because of their loyalty to her.

Leila is all about opposites coming together. She’s human and fae; sarcastic and soft; strong in magic but weak in her own realm; intelligent but ignorant in a lot of fae ways.

There won’t ever be another heroine quite like Leila, but I loved her story, and I can’t wait to watch her keep growing as the Magiford stories continue.

That’s all for today, Champions! I hope you enjoyed our character studies. We still have a few more themed posts to go through–I hope you’re having as much fun as I am! Until next time, have a beautiful day!

 

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